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iOS Accessibility Scanner Framework

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

At Google, we are committed to accessibility and are constantly looking for ways to improve our development process to discover, debug and fix accessibility issues. Today we are excited to announce a new open source project: Accessibility Scanner for iOS (or GSCXScanner as we lovingly call it). This is a developer tool that can assist in locating and fixing accessibility issues while an app is being developed.

App development can be a time consuming process, especially when it involves human testers. Sometimes, as in the case with accessibility testing, they are necessary. A developer can write automated tests to perform some accessibility checks, but GSCXScanner takes this one step further. When a new feature is being developed, often there are several iterations of code changes, building, launching and trying out the new feature. It is faster and easier to fix accessibility issues with the feature if they can be detected during this phase when the developer is working with the new feature.

GSCXScanner lives in your app process and can perform accessibility checks on the UI currently on the screen simply with the touch of a button. The scanner’s UI which is overlaid on the app can be moved around so you can use your app normally and trigger a scan only when you need it. Also, it uses GTXiLib, a library of iOS accessibility checks to scan your app, and you can author your own GTX checks and have them run along with scanner’s default checks.

Using the scanner does not eliminate the need for manual testing or automated tests, these are must haves for delivering quality products. But GCSXScanner can speed up the development process by showing issues in app during development.